With gratitude and joy, I write to share big news!
I have been selected as an exhibiting artist at Celebration of Fine Artin Scottsdale, Arizona for the 2026 season! This news is the result of seven years of love and faithful work.
It has taken me this long not just to reach the caliber needed to earn a spot in the show, but to build my life and practice to the point where I could invest in transplanting my studio (including my fourteen-foot longarm sewing machine) for an intesnsive three months of the year. It’s daunting how much work is yet to come, but the show brims with promise for me and my career. This show alone generates the bulk annual salary for many of its exhibiting artists. More than that, the network of artists is “a village:” a deeply connected community supporting one other year after year. I am so grateful to hold a key.
A bit about the show: From January to March every year, 100 artists gather under one 40,000 sq-foot tent in the Arizona desert to create and showcase thier work for the robust art-collecting community of Scottsdale. The show blends studio space and commercial gallery space for each artist and operates like a marathon art fair. Learn more here.
Seven years in the making: My Celebration of Fine Art Story
In 2018, after a couple years of selling my work, and after my first big solo exhibition, Sacred Window, at Colorado College, I made a pilgrimage to Celebration of Fine Art. The experience rooted itself into my soul– even as an emerging artist in my twenties, I felt a conviction to build my life and practice toward becoming an exhibiting artist at CFA. I’ve been working toward that goal ever since!
Every experience since that time has been preparing me to successfully integrate into the community of exhibiting artists at Celebration of Fine Art. Graduate school was a prime example. For three years while earning my MFA at the University of Kansas, I worked seven days a week in shared studios and exhibition spaces, managing the dance between creation and community discourse. I amiably cultivated a culture of reciprocity among my fellow artists, who were also spending nearly all their waking hours alongside me. Meanwhile, through my teaching practice, I continued guiding people of diverse backgrounds and of all ages to experience the transformative power of art for themselves.
Since graduate school, my studio practice continues to be prolific; I have had three gallery-spanning solo exhibitions of distinct bodies of work in the past three years: TerMinAL mA, at Edgar Heap of Birds Family Gallery in Lawrence, Kansas; Lifeline, at Jonas Gallery in Colby, Kansas; and Everyday Saints, and The Art Base in Basalt, Colorado. And now, after all this growth and preparation, I am finally at the place where I can afford to set aside three months of time to be in Scottsdale for Celebration.
I returned to CFA for a visit in February and March of this year, just to be sure it still felt right (you may even recall me mentioning a work trip to Arizona from my Feburary letter, and my hopeful post-application buzz from my April letter, both of which you can find in my Dear Artist Archives). And instantly I felt at home again! I was delighted to reunite with several people I met on my first visit including artists Gabriela Aguilo & Pete Tillack, plus Joanne in the office. I also had lovely conversations with new artist friends like Parker Mcdonald, Trevor Swanson, Cindy Dimascio, and Carlos Page (our young sons could be twins, and they had the most adorable playdate!). Parker even showed me the new shipping container studio spaces, which would accommodate my fourteen-foot-long sewing machine perfectly.
Now, finally, I have the work, experience, and means to begin my first exhibition year with Celebration of Fine Arts!
Then and Now: A Buried Idea
2018: Me and Interior Landscapes, a modular work exhibitied in Sacred Window: Myth, Magic, & Metanarrative in the Quilt, my undergraduate thesis exhibition at Colorado College. Later that year I traveled to Scottsdale, Arizona, and made my first connections with exhibiting artists at Celebration of Fine Art.
Interior Landscapes, 2017, 11.5″ X 59″ each, cotton canvas on stretchers, Procion MX chemical dye, Isacord thread, assorted yarns. Multi-immersion dyework, free motion couching, free motion quilting, and free motion embroidery.
2024: Me and FEAR NOT, the modular altarpiece featured in Everyday Saints, my solo exhibition at the Art Base in Basalt, Colorado.
FEAR NOT, 2024, 7’ x 39’, modular installation in nine components of varying sizes, free-motion stitchwork, torn silk, fragments from the artist’s wedding dress, fragments from the artist’s childhood blanket, wool, rayon, polyester, acetate, and 23-karat gold leaf on hand-dyed and hand-painted cotton.
In 2017, when I first had the inspiration to create the work that eventually became Interior Landscapes, I envisioned a nine-panel modular wall work. However, during the creation process, three and then four of the panels branched off from the set to became other artworks, and the nine-part modular wall piece didn’t (yet) get its moment.
Modulartity and movement have continued to be deeply important to my process, though, and I find it delightfully serendipitious to see other artworks along my journey in the past seven years that have branched out from a buried idea.
Silverware Reliquaries, 2021, birch plywood CNC-carved with lace patterns from my wedding dress, 50 coats of laquer, copper lampwire, copper hardware tacks, graphite (various sizes to fit individual pieces of my stepdad’s stainless-seel silverware)
This nine-piece set of silverware reliquaries is an interesting midpoint in the timeline of the creation process between Interior Landscapes and FEAR NOT. These reliquaries fit into larger chests, like Unity/Separation (not pictured here but I encourage a visit to that page of the website), which in turn rest on an altar table and bookshelf–all handmade and interrelated trousseau objects as “furniture for moving” and part of TerMinAL mA.
So much has developed in these seven years, and I am grateful to have had you in my life during this formative time!
I am still traveling, so I can’t include my usual handwritten component and podcast episode, so look forward to next month’s letter with these usual favorites plus a rundown of my (still ongoing) summertime travel highlights!
